


static to the heart

by Randstad



Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:47:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1838248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randstad/pseuds/Randstad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Electroconvulsive therapy might have helped Harry reconsider his position on vengeance, if it didn't also accidentally reunite him with Electro. Or, well, what's left of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	static to the heart

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer: only the loosest of research was done, my excuse is comic book psychiatric facility secretly detaining a former lizard man and homicidal rich boy LOOK I DO WHAT I WANT
> 
> also unedited, with apologies

Ravencroft isn't the worst place to be, for a prison that masquerades as a happy house. Three hots and a cot, and electric shock therapy that Harry is pretty sure he doesn't need. It doesn't keep the voices out, neither the one that sounds too much like his father nor the one that croaks out of him when he wakes up green around the gills, and it doesn't seem to affect the rate at which the goblin crawls out of his throat and spills itself over his skin and scalp, but Fiers calls the shots when it comes to his care, and so shock therapy it is.

What the shocks do abate is a dream that recurs, one that fills his mouth with venom, that weighs his chest down. It's about Peter Parker, the two of them young and then old, arm-in-arm until Peter's got the mask on and the pain is cracking him in two and they're fighting, always fighting, with the quake of the clock tower beneath his glider and the sound of Gwen Stacy's broken neck in his ears. Peter's the most vibrant memory he has, the boat from which he casts the fishing line of his every independent thought, and sometimes the fact feels so vile that Harry's even a little grateful that the shock therapy can chase it away.

But Fiers, loyal ally though he is, certainly doesn't do this out of the goodness of his heart. Fiers must know the shocks don't help. The voices stay. The dream disappears, then comes back, more graphic than ever. Harry's still crazy. Not much new here—not much that can be unearthed by electric currents, anyway. 

He's about to tell them to stop the procedures for good when there's an afternoon where they lay him down and crank it up too hard, turn some dial somewhere all the way to the left, and put him under. In the aftermath he gets flashes of it, how they almost fried the hair right out of his temples, cooked his brain in his head, and afterwards there are times his skin feels hot and tight and smoky and he thinks it'll be another lifetime before his body ever steadies out again—

But that could also be the sickness, the goblin, and in the present day they've pulled the electrodes from his skin and unstrapped his wrists from the cot, and all at once the reason why Fiers ordered this in the first place strikes him like inspiration. Like lightning.

 _harry_ , a new voice says, bassy, familiar. 

Harry freezes as he rubs his shaky wrists. To his left and right the doctors roll away equipment, and a nurse stands him up; he looks over one shoulder and then the next for the source of the voice.

_harry_

It's a voice that makes his ears itch, the hairs on the back of his neck straightened up like reeds in a breeze. “… Max,” he says. “Max. Max?”

“Max who,” the nurse says, deadpan because she doesn't care for the answer. But as she steers Harry to his room she looks up, at the paneled lights overhead that flicker and fade between yellow and black, and she says, “Man, we gotta do something about the power here.”

 _harryharryharry_ , the voice pounds in his head.

Harry lets his head loll back so he can get a look at the lights himself. “Yeah,” he says. Aftershocks vibrate in his skull, in time with the exact stutter of the lights, and he licks his dry lips so it doesn't hurt to grin. “We sure do.”

 

-

 

Nowadays when Harry's allowed to stalk the halls of Ravencroft, his hands in straps in front of him, he falls into the habit of murmuring to himself. It's a habit that follows him back to his cell, and doesn't help the asylum rumor mill that whispers about how Harry Osborn's sanity continues to teeter on unsalvageable. 

In truth he talks to wires, to lamps and machinery, because those are the places where the voice comes more clearly, like he's a live antenna in search of the right angle. Some days are better than others, stormy days where the air pressure outside must carry currents better.

Mostly Electro just says his name. _harry_ , he says. _harryharryharry_ , threaded tightly enough to be ambient noise instead of speech. Sometimes he says _spider-man_ , heavy as a bass drop, and Harry likes that, the suggestion that they're alike in the weight they attach to the very concept of Spider-Man. Misery and company: it's not often that people get to commiserate over the man who murdered them.

For his part Harry keeps it as simple as a game of Marco Polo. “Afternoon, Max,” he says to wires, surge protectors, outlets. “Keeping it together?”

It's not the most tactful question, in his opinion, but the answer is always no anyway. Whatever Spider-Man did to him seems to have scattered him across pieces of atmosphere and dismantled his consciousness enough that names are all he can speak, names that he must have attached richly to sentiments. Harry knows how that feels, too, to only have objects of intense focus left. He can count what matters to him now on six fingers, and that doesn't even include Peter Parker. 

Sunday afternoon, the one day Harry gets access to books. He's a quarter of the way through Sun Tzu by lamplight when suddenly a spark flicks out onto the page; he cages it absently with the tip of his thumb and says, concentration unbroken, “Hey, Max. Keeping it together?”

He expects the usual silence, or the usual sullen _spider-man_ , but—

 _trying_ , the voice says, and Harry looks up. Smiles.

 

-

 

Eventually the voice clears enough in the comfort of Harry's own cell, with the lone lamp above his cot. He spreads out on his back, one knee drawn up, one hand idle over the bile-colored sores on his skin that itch when he forgets them too long. He counts his teeth with his tongue, licks at the slime that gathers in his gums, blinks away the crust in his eyes. The lamp watches impassively, but it sparks sometimes, which is how he knows Electro hasn't disappeared completely.

“Max,” he says out loud. “I got a raw deal in here. Way too quiet.”

The light flicks.

Harry shifts in bed so he can lie on his side. “That's why it was nice of you to show up when you did,” he says conversationally. “Good to have a friend in here.”

 _friend_ , the voice says.

“Yeah. Friend.” 

The lamp sparks some more, a pleased thin shower. 

Harry mulls it over, then decides, what the hell. “I miss you,” he adds. If he's honest with himself, it's an experimental statement, an independent variable. He doesn't miss much nowadays. Not the broad beautiful beaches of Brazil, not his cars, neither health nor life. Honesty too. But the lights go white-hot bright, and down the hall he hears a light bulb crack. 

_you miss me?_

Harry doesn't laugh, but the smile he flicks down towards his hands is a little rueful. “Of course I do, Max,” he says. “World's a darker place without you in it.” 

If Electro can sense the joke, there's no way to tell. The lights don't dim at all, which means he still has the full attention of his guest, so he lets himself stare clinically at the lampshade, the wires that run above. 

“What about you, Max?” he says. “Do you miss me?”

The light flickers repeatedly, the way an open mouth might trip over a thought.

_you_

_miss_

Abruptly the noise dies out. Harry steeples his hands low on his stomach and offers up a smirk. “I'll take that as a yes,” he says, in a voice that must sound too sweet, because the light burns bright, the glass shatters completely, all the last whispers fade out straight away. 

Apropos of little Harry thinks of Peter's easy evasion, the way his sentences tapered off into stutters when his neurons fired too fast. He closes his eyes. 

When he opens them the next day there's a new light bulb, with a little note tacked on it that bears Fiers's initials. That crafty son of a bitch, Harry thinks, and laughs out loud, so loud he can't hear the clatter of the breakfast tray when it slides through the door.

 

-

 

The body finally appears before him one night, loose in form, more a set of splintered shocks that form the rough approximation of a nervous system. Harry wonders if this is what people see when they think aliens come into their rooms at night. Or God.

“Harry,” Electro rumbles.

Harry slouches back in his bunk. The bass of Electro's mere presence makes his teeth rattle into a grin. “Max.”

“ _Electro._ ”

He shakes his head and starts the arduous process of unfolding himself from his flat tan mattress. “You'll always be Max to me, Max,” he murmurs, with a stretch that cracks his neck and back. The specter in the cell doesn't have eyes but he knows it watches with the distant, predatory precision of a surveillance drone; he skims his hand over the blooms of sickly green on his neck and smiles. “Sorry I didn't have time to freshen up.”

More idioms lost to Electro's ears. The body still collects itself, hazily sketches out the outline of a person, and Harry turns his back politely. But then the sound of power surging its way between the ersatz body and the overhead light grows too loud to ignore, and Harry thinks, ah, and turns around, his attention demanded and now delivered.

Skeleton next, imperfectly remembered, with a thin blue drape of firework skin. “Aren't you a sight for sore eyes,” Harry says. “Come on. You can do it. Show me the money.”

The body shivers in answer. “Harry,” it says. “I.”

There's a pause in which the glow of Electro's skin intermittently brightens and then fades. Harry cocks his head when another minute ticks by. “What's the matter?” he asks. “Can't concentrate?”

Two lost eyes blink out at Harry like distant stars, and the body turns translucent. The frayed ends of the nervous system beneath seem to crumble away for a second, fragile as sand castles. “Harry.”

Harry's thoughts fly to his plans for the next few months to a year, the team half-formed in this prison, Spider-Man free in his city; he doesn't like that panic rises in him like a sudden high tide. “Max,” he says. “Get it together, Max. I need you to do this for me, I need you to do it right.”

“Harry—”

He slams his hand against the wall. “ _Focus_ , Max!”

The lights in the whole joint flicker; there's a stir in the other cells, a murmur of voices. Even though Electro seems to fade in and out of real, actual existence, the eyes remain, eerily still. 

Harry sucks in a breath. Different tack. “Come on,” he pleads. “It can't be that hard, right? Don't you want this?” He searches his mind quickly for the right words, words that might've worked on him a lifetime ago. “Don't you want to be with me?” 

It's like someone jump-started the entire institute: the body snaps back into place, the lights everywhere go white white white, a mouth forms on the face just to fall slightly open. Oh, Harry thinks, and then—oh. 

He spares a second to be flabbergasted. It passes quickly, though; he wasn't born yesterday. He lets a smile spread across his face, and he presses himself flat against the wall, skates a hand down over the front of his jumpsuit towards his navel. He eyes Electro as the body brightens again, an uneasy shift of light in the darkness of the corridor, and when he touches his white fingertips to the zip of the suit the body buzzes out of sight and Electro reconstitutes right in front of him, distinct naked outline, hungry sunlit eyes. 

Harry can't help his laugh. “That's it,” he croons, and when he slides his hand into the suit he's not all that surprised to find that he's already half-hard. “C'mere, baby.”

He touches himself, nice and easy. It's been awhile, since life in the institution and the rage in his sick chest doesn't exactly inspire his libido. But the heat of Electro's eyes, the staticky pulse of him in this neutral space, well, that doesn't hurt. With his mouth open, panting softly, the air itself tastes like batteries. His own touch on his cock starts to sear.

And then suddenly there's the formation of coal black casing on the limbs, the boots, the hands. One hand reaches out and touches Harry tentatively square in the center of his chest. The other gloved hand reaches down, dreamlike, to hover inches from the stretched outline of Harry's cock. Harry can feel the energy beneath, vibrant, barely sustained; it pulses over him like a painful static shock; his eyes roll back into his head and he comes.

When he opens his eyes Electro is still less than inches away, his eyes lantern-bright on Harry's wet hand. The curve of his jaw is near-solid, close enough to kiss, and Harry's mouth tingles at the mere thought. 

But it's a bad idea for a guy who doesn't wanna die, so instead he looks up and smiles. Not a nice smile. Not that Electro can tell the difference. He lifts his hand and drags his tongue through the spatter of his own come, and that's it, the power in the entire goddamn complex just _goes_. The only light in the place is Electro, and how he shines on Harry's skin in the dark. 

“Going my way?” Harry says.

Without a word Electro vanishes. The cell door opens. The alarm from the backup generator sounds, then fizzles out.

Harry zips up his jumpsuit and shoves his hands in his pockets. Gate after gate opens for him as he exits the Ravencroft Institute. He doesn't have breath enough to whistle this time, not after that orgasm, but that's okay; there are no million-dollar questions left to answer, just power now, in his hands, at his beck and call. As he steps out onto the street the air pressure picks up, makes his skin prickle. He doesn't have much of a basis for comparison, but it feels good, he supposes. Like fingers in his thinning hair.


End file.
